A Bafta rising star nominee for his musically-driven performance, Caton tells Screen: “I’ve been singing since I was three, preparing for this moment my whole life”
There is an instantly iconic scene in Ryan Coogler’s 1930s-set Southern gothic drama Sinners in which young sharecropper Sammie Moore strums the blues to a packed juke joint. “Blown away by his voice, patrons start to smile,” reads the stage direction in Coogler’s screenplay. The film’s voiceover, meanwhile, tells of “people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death”.
And sure enough, it happens, a single shot swirling through musicians past, present and future as they rock the joint with a medley of African tribal music, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, funk, hip-hop and more. The sequence serves as an extraordinary tribute to the evolution of Black music in response to trauma and oppression, and it is dependent largely on Miles Caton, who plays Sammie, delivering the vocal goods. No pressure, then.
“That was actually the least pressure I had,” shrugs the 20-year-old Brooklyn native. “Being a first-time actor was definitely the most pressure and the biggest focus. I mean, I’ve been singing since I was three years old, preparing for that moment my whole life. I was extremely ready, extremely excited. Then it was just understanding the importance of that scene, which was explained to me by Ryan. Reading history, understanding the blues.”
Caton was given a playlist of 100-plus songs by Coogler. The genre’s “raw storytelling” was new to him, but enrapturing audiences with his performance skills was not. Born into a musical family, he appeared on BET’s Bobby Jones Gospel as a child, and went viral, aged 12, with his soul-shivering performance of Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’.
“We got a call from Jay Z’s team and they wanted to put that video on his 4.44 short film,” he grins. “That was crazy, going to school, like, ‘Yeah, I’m in Jay Z’s video.’”
Aged 16, Caton started touring with Grammy-winning R&B singer/songwriter H.E.R. He was spotted by “somebody in the crowd” and invited to audition for Sinners, not then knowing it was a Ryan Coogler picture starring Michael B Jordan.
Double trouble
Caton got to read for both men at a third audition, in Los Angeles, but still he only knew that Sammie was a 19-year-old sharecropper. “At that point, I’m thinking it’s a biopic,” he says. The word “vampires” had not yet been uttered, and everything continued piece by piece – Caton was only handed the lyrics to his centrepiece blues number a week before shooting it.
“Ludwig [Göransson, composer] had taught me ‘I Lied To You’ on the guitar, but there still wasn’t any lyrics yet,” he recalls. When they did finally arrive, penned by veteran R&B songwriter Raphael Saadiq, they impressed Caton with how they crystallised the struggles between Sammie and his preacher father, who sees the devil in his son’s music. “I was just like, ‘Wow, this is saying everything that [Sammie] can’t say in person. It was really cool.”
Also cool, though technically challenging, was acting opposite two Jordans as Smoke and Stack, twin brothers who put together a grand opening for a juke joint in their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi having returned from working for Al Capone in Chicago.
“That was pretty tricky,” explains Caton, especially for scenes using a HaloRig. “It is like 12 cameras capturing [Jordan’s] whole performance. They had to put that around him, so there was a certain distance you would have to stand away from him.”
First-time actor Caton rose to the challenge, and his work has been noticed – he won best young actor at the Critics Choice Awards and earned a supporting actor nomination for SAG-AFTRA’s newly named Actors Awards. He is also nominated for Bafta’s rising star award, alongside Chase Infiniti, Robert Aramayo, Archie Madekwe and Posy Sterling.
Being nominated is “surreal”, he says, knowing that past recipients include the likes of James McAvoy, Kristen Stewart and Daniel Kaluuya. “It makes me want to keep working and keep building towards a career like that.”
Music continues to be a driving force in his life – he has a new EP out in the summer, with a tour to follow – but Caton has been bitten by the acting bug. “I’m searching for the next projects,” he nods. “I want to be wise about my decisions and choose projects that have this type of effect on people, that can change perspectives and evoke thoughts.”
Not that he expects every future movie to match Sinners in garnering 16 Oscar, 13 Bafta and five Grammy nominations. “I love action-adventure movies. I could see myself doing something like that next. Sinners has opened so many doors.”
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